Here is a very personal epiphany I want to share with you guys.
before getting to the point you might need a little background story. The last one and a half year I have been doing a lot of concept art mostly for a local game company here in Copenhagen. Concept art is great and it is fun. For me it was a very well deserved pause from doing fully rendered and much detailed cover works. I was being a little fed up with the whole work load it is to do giant covers. Mind you, not that I do not like it, it is just becoming more and more predictable over the years, since I already know where this will go in the sketching stage: Already while defining the characters I almost feel tired from knowing how long a road it will be to render it all to perfectness. If anything that is the downside of rutine and of having done the same thing for so long.
So; the workday of sketching and concepting drawings that didn't have to be final rendered was a fantastic time. I could go with an idea, quickly sketch it and splash some colours on it and on to the next idea. It felt good and spontaneous and was just what i needed for awhile.
But after a year of doing that I was becoming like Bilbo Baggins "Like to little butter, spread over too much bread". I felt like a creative sponge that had been squeezed too much. The day in and day out of constant inventing and getting new fast ideas was draining my ability to create. I longed back to the pauses of actually rendering details and letting the mind go a little. I was tormented by the thought of never being able to be content as an artist if I couldn't do the one or the other way. If I couldn't be a concept artist and I couldn't be a cover artist, where would I find my place?
This was when I started doing the Plein Air paintings that gave me a release from the pressure and at the same time revoked my joy of painting. When painting a tombstone or an oak tree from life you can for the most part aboard the idea of thinking illustrative. the painting needs only a minimum of compositional thought and you can easily get lost in just painting what is in front of you. It was all I needed at the time.
Then I went to France with some friends to play roleplaying games for an extended weekend. My friend we stayed with had a neighbour who was a landscape painter and just in case he wanted to paint I brought my stuff also. His name is Paul Rafferty and he is a fantastic painter. We arranged so that I could paint at his studio with him. He was painting a cityscape and I started painted him painting from a spot in the back of his studio.

the final version

Pauls portrait

I started out as if I was doing an illustration. Sketching everything up in pencil lines and trying to get every detail right. I then proceeded to add colours, but after half an hour I noticed that the painting was going fast downhill and looking more and more like a shitty illustration no emotion and no drive. I was doing something wrong and was apparently oozing out my frustration. Paul asked me what was wrong and he looked at my painting/illustration. "Jesper, you are thinking too much like an illustrator" he grabbed a wooden board from a shelf and started painting me while talking. "you should concentrate more on shape and light than on line and composition", he said while dotting away on the board he held in his hand. I took a long look at my helpless situation and brought ot the biggest brush I had, and proceeded to do bigger more spontaneous strokes. When Paul showed me his quick little portrait I knew exactly what he meant: In less than ten minutes he captured everything needed with only blocking in shape and adding light. With that in mind I proceeded and ended up with something much more alive than when I started.
When we were done and talked over a coffee Paul suggested something. " you should try to loose all these narrative thoughts you have. Forget the composition and the idea of telling a story all the time. Because it will be there anyway. you have been painting for a long time anyway, it is with you whatever you wanted it or not and will be added subconsciously anyway, have no fear". When he saw the horror on my face he laughed" I know it must sound awful to you, having been an illustrator for so long but you should try to paint thing y ou like more, rather than solving assignments. In letting go and just doing what you like you will rediscover the joy of painting and the rest will come easier".
these were the words that stuck with me, and has ever since. There hasn't been a day where my mind hasn't gone back to those ideas. I have been, as many of you might know, obsessed with telling a story and being very focused on controlling every aspect of an illustration to maximize my narrative angle best. I have been developing a system for illustrating, a system that over the years has tired out. This "letting go" idea, will be my new road.
I will stumble, I will fail and I am sure to be extremely frustrated, but I will have fun!